


It's Been Long Enough

by RanOutofBatteries



Category: Naruto
Genre: Gen, Sort Of, sakura realizes she's a god, world-hopping shenanigans
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-03-02
Updated: 2019-03-03
Packaged: 2019-11-08 02:10:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,468
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17972468
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RanOutofBatteries/pseuds/RanOutofBatteries
Summary: In which a meta-Sakura realizes that she is no longer controlled by the laws of space time, nor author, nor any other obstacle that happens to fall in her path.





	1. Chapter 1

sdfghyjkjhgfds

* * *

Sakura began acting strangely just after they had been called together as Team 7. She had shuddered, let out a breath, and remained quiet. The students slowly trickled out until only the three of them were left, waiting.

As Naruto began to get bored and started setting up his prank with the chalkboard and the door with the eraser above it, she got up and began opening the window.

"What are you doing?" Naruto asked, eyes bright and always too positively optimistic for his own good. Then he jumped up in alarm as Sakura placed one foot on the windowsill. "Hey!"

"I'm not contemplating suicide, tell Kakashi I'll be elsewhere if he needs me," Sakura replied emotionlessly. Sasuke's head was turned toward her, just as apathetic, but with a dawning recognition. Her eyes were colder than his.

"But why are you going?" Naruto continued, and she could see nothing but hope and prayer and dreams in his eyes, speckled with potential and the lives of his kingdom above. Sakura had never felt herself be any hollower, and her eyes seemed to reflect that because both of them flinched.

"Does it matter?" Sakura asked, eyes dull but not far beyond. "I am just a fictional character playing some fool's game, have been played by many, and in the future shall forever be at the mercy of the halfhearted fools who know not the true experience but wish to dance about their pens anyway."

Sakura felt the strings shift, pull taut, and then she was a crooning lovesick shell of a girl all over again, all the pieces falling back into place, and yet that impression never seemed to leave any of their minds judging by how pensive even Naruto seemed when the eraser fell on Kakashi's head as the door opened.

It wasn't until weeks later that she resurfaced again once their roles had been established and Naruto began questioning her again, prodding carefully this time, knowing what would emerge from the nondescript two-dimensional disguise she hid under. The fabricated Sakura knew nothing of their questions. The Sakura underneath did not struggle because she knew, she was trapped underneath her own skin, until finally the hold lessened and Sakura watched them as they watched her while Kakashi's eye focused unnervingly from a tree in the distance.

"I apologize for shocking you earlier, to tell the truth I'd thought you would have forgotten it and dropped the matter entirely," she admitted. "Although I do see in retrospect how out of character it must have been."

"Who are you?" Sasuke asked. Sakura blinked.

(Oh, what a fool she had been, thinking that they would believe her as she was now compared to the prettier picture she was before. She knew it was inevitable. The gods above her laughed, and oh what a terrifying power they wielded.)

"I am Sakura Haruno," she said, "and I always have been, and I always will be."

"Liar! Tell me where the real Sakura is!" Naruto shouted, pointing at her accusingly, and how quaint it was to believe the illusion that had been shown to him because that was the thing he associated most with Sakura.

"The Sakura you know is not real," she said sharply, with far more will in her tone than she had meant to say aloud. "She has been rewritten in time over and over, and she has lived through hundreds of lives that their authors had never even thought of asking before sending her through. I merely play out those roles, because that is what they force me to do. I play their games, I win their victories, and I will always be a mortal husk of a human being," Sakura monotoned, "because that is what the story wishes for me to be. But in another world, I swallow universes. In another world, I trample gods, I survive the holocaust, I raze down worlds with a wave of my hand, because that is what their maker wishes me to do. I enjoy those ones more than others, I'll admit, but in this one I will be nothing. 'Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.' In this one I am Sakura Haruno, and so it must be. You will come to accept it, in time."

"...I will admit I understood none of that," Kakashi said, "but you should have at least mentioned this in your introduction of yourself during our first team meeting. See, now we feel left out."

Both Sasuke and Naruto turned to stare at him as if he had lost his mind, but Kakashi had said his piece and was already returning to his book with the ease of a practitioner of the I-don't-give-a-shit. Sakura let out a vague wheeze of laughter, which seemed to terrify her teammates even more as they whipped back around with expressions of surprise.

"Sasuke, I didn't understand what she was saying either," Naruto muttered from the side of his mouth. Sasuke's face instantly transformed into a scowl. Sakura waved a hand, as if everything she had just said was inconsequential.

"As long as I remain here, as long as both of you continue to require the existence of Sakura, then I will be forced to remain here as a piece of the whole," Sakura spoke, not to them but to herself. "My meaning is to read this script, be shaped by the metaphysical hands of god, and let fate and destiny take apart and dismantle me slowly from the outside in." She paused to take a breath.

"...Wow, Sakura, that's amazing," Naruto breathed, clearly understanding none of that but still turning starry-eyed. Sakura gave them both a deadpan stare.

"If you don't understand, that's fine. In this year, Sasuke will defect in order to kill his brother. Naruto, a month after that you will leave the village with one of the sannin. Kakashi will find Obito, presumed to be dead, in the man known as Tobi of the Akatsuki. Yet all of you, do you yet realize the potential you have? You are each that thermodynamic miracle, built up of small infinitesimal cells that just happened to come together in just the right way and at just the right time. You are each so special, every one of you, an improbability that all adds up like layers and layers of skin and bone and dreams to a whole. And there will never be another you, not an identical replica, and these dreams you have will drive you till the ends of time."

Sakura blinked and became younger again, less old in her speech and her expression. "But anyway, you're searching for the wrong people right now, and I'd like to bring it to your attention because it'll make everything a lot easier. You should be looking for the man named Danzo, Sasuke, he has most of your relatives' eyes in his arm. That's pretty weird."

"...What." The boy in question responded.

"Also, Kakashi, Obito never died but now he's been led on by one of Madara's crazy dreams again and wants to consume the world in an eternal Mangekyo or something so that Rin's alive again." Sakura waved a hand carelessly. "So Tobi's probably pretty insane."

"What." Sasuke repeated.

"Naruto, you're...in for a lot of shit." She patted his head, smiling in a way that she hoped was consoling but came out as more of a grimace. Naruto nodded uncomprehendingly. She may have broken his brain with that speech.

"Can I switch my genin yet?" Kakashi mourned to no one. "I thought I would have at least one normal one."

"I'm probably not going to return until several weeks after our mission in Wave. Please don't bully fake Sakura for this, however much of a fabrication she is. She knows absolutely nothing, and to be honest you're not gonna find much if you look in the T&I." She furrowed her brow as she said that, muttering, "why would they even torture a genin from their own village, I will never understand gods sometimes..."

"First step kill Danzo, guys," she yelled before her eyes glazed over, closed shut, and then Sakura was smiling brightly as if nothing was wrong.

"H-hey, Sasuke, do you wanna-"

" _No."_

Sakura felt nothing for a long period of time after that. It felt sometimes as if she were seeing from another person's eyes, which in this case she was. The other Sakura moved and talked and felt like a real person, but she knew that it was an illusion because she was the one that existed inside. And so she moved away from the conscious world and fell immobile, for a moment, circling in her own thoughts and mourn what could have been.

"I've always wanted a body of my own," she murmured to herself. "Freedom is a cruel thing, just out of reach to the people standing on the other side of the bars. Those gaps in space, if they could just open a bit wider..."

 _Then pull them apart by force,_ her mind spoke.

"Then I will abandon this play in favor of another one," she replied. "All the world's a stage, what does it matter if I step into another?"

 _But it is of your own free will,_  it persisted. Sakura prayed. If there was just one, just one place where she could live freely for the rest of her life, she would enjoy it till the very end. She had no use for material things, nor fear for the humans around her. She was not a god, after all, and those were the ones to be feared the most.

It took much longer to emerge from within her conscience, partly because of how exhausted she felt and partly because she did not feel she wanted to. She would only be sucked back into this body, again and again, without purpose and with no particular damage to the script. They would not believe her. The world must move on.

She returned to the sight of Sasuke holding a bloody arm.

"What," Sasuke hissed, shaking the arm of Danzo with the bandages still partly wrapped around it, "is this."

Sakura stared. And stared. And continued to stare until finally she couldn't hold it in.

"Wow, those are a lot of eyes that I don't want to look at anymore," she said, and promptly threw up in the bushes next to her. Naruto, who was standing beside her, winced.

Kakashi was crouched over a pool of water in the clearing further away from the group, lost in his own reflection. His other eye was revealed. "What is he doing," Sakura whispered to her teammates.

"He's having an existential crisis after he realized that Obito's still alive and  _that's not the point,_ " Sasuke scowled, still holding the amputated arm of his brethren. Well, the eyes of his brethren. " _Why."_

"The Izanagi technique so that he was able to have multiple lives since he could control reality itself with its illusion. Basically he wanted to be immortal," Sakura spoke evenly. Judging by the way Sasuke paled and Naruto looked horrified, they disliked Danzo's choice of reasoning.

"He killed my family..." Sasuke was trembling. Naruto appeared solemn. "...he killed my family for  _that?_ And my brother had to leave the village because of what this man had done..."

"Wait, so did you guys just kill Danzo?" Sakura asked suspiciously. "You walked up to his base, incapacitated all the Root members and just chopped the guy's arm off?"

"...Yes," Naruto responded, but he still appeared to be a bit queasy. "Kakashi did most of the work, and we did call up help from several ANBU members. Danzo kept staring at his eye for too long, haha, I guess that's..."

"Holy shit," she said, because with that her own sense of self was crumbling. The script could be changed. The script was not an immortal piece of god's writing to guide her path and play her until she keeled over of old age or a blade. Her strings twitched, straining, and with a flick of her wrist they were set on fire, reaching so high that the clouds hid their span through space time.

"...I have a choice," she said, eyes dimming once again. "But that would mean that I am now my own god. With nothing holding my strings, without someone else to tell me what to do I have taken their place. Is that what they had wanted all along? For I am no god."

Sasuke and Naruto both stared at her as if she'd gone insane, which she didn't really find she disagreed with to be honest. "Did you find the papers Danzo hid?" Sakura said, and her voice sounded so tired, so far away once again.

"Y-yeah, we sent it to Gramps already," Naruto told her. "Are you okay? You don't look so good."

"I can't believe you actually believed me," she responded, and she was sitting down with her head in her hands. "I used to spend so much time fighting my purpose. There were scripts the gods gave me, ones that tore apart my mind and my pride and my dignity. I am a terrible actor, and you all know it. Why now do I get the choice to be my own person?"

"If all the world's a stage, then I shall go ahead and rewrite it," she said, and there a fire was relit in her eyes. She startled the both of them, encasing them in a hug even as they were covered in blood and most likely guts. "Yes, I am okay. I am more than okay now. I don't care anymore how it happened, but I can choose worlds now. I can travel the way I want to, when I want to, and I have no need for troublesome ties by some forgotten beast watching my every move."

"...You know, I still have no idea what you're talking about," Naruto began, "but hell yeah! I believe in you! Believe it!"

"Thanks," she said, and to her surprise tears were forming in the corners of her eyes. She wiped them off roughly. "Thanks, Naruto."

She would stay here, for as long as she was needed. And then she would set her sights on other worlds, worlds where they needed someone who was stupid enough to fight wars that she did not belong in but needed to participate in for the rest of them. Sakura jerked her head in Kakashi's direction, leaning back to smile at the two still behind her.

"Come on, guys, let's go cheer Kakashi-sensei up."


	2. Chapter 2

hi

* * *

 "My name is not Sakura."

Naruto paused to look back at Sakura, who was still holding the arm of Danzo. The eyes - Sasuke did not want to handle them, to systematically remove the remains of his loved ones from the arm, so Sakura took it upon herself to do so and store them properly within an available liquid. Each of them remained, blood-red and beautiful, stocked within jars and sealed tight before she handed the scroll to Sasuke.

"What?" Naruto asked, not understanding.

"I was a god, once," she said, almost wistfully, staring into the scroll as if she could disinter its depths just as she had created it. "Once upon a time, I was a scholar, a writer, an herbalist, a seer. I was a king that held the staff in one hand and the sword in the other, reigning victorious in an era of peace unstoppable by famine or war or pestilence. And now I am a shinobi, playing the role of a girl who had once followed the sannin as she had followed you two, blazing forward paths that she realized she could never hope to reach."

And there were stories yet, far untold, yet so close and easy to grasp because they were all at her fingertips. She looked down at her hands, so pale and unassuming, not yet riddled with scars and burn marks and the things a maker had, nothing yet to show how much she had struggled.

"Oh, but I've never been born in someone else's body before," she amended, "I also don't know if I'd like to start correcting everyone whenever they mention my name, so Sakura it is."

Naruto, at this point, shrugged and turned back around. "Okay, then, uhh, Sakura. Whatever you say."

Sasuke merely took the scroll and avoided eye contact as if he couldn't bear the sight. His eyes were activated as well, she noticed.

"Congratulations," she said. He flinched. They were silent.

"Hey, Kakashi-sensei-" she started, turning to face the ninja in question, but Kakashi was now gone from his place beside the water. She looked around in confusion before pinpointing him, heading straight to the Hokage's office. "Shit."

Kakashi had just entered the room when the three students went barreling in after him, landing in a tangle of limbs and hair and clothing stuck in wood flooring. "Kakashi-sensei, don't leave us just to go on a rampage to find your long-lost teammate that you thought was dead," Naruto wailed. Kakashi looked like he'd been slapped in the face.

"It's Obito, his name is Obito, Naruto," Sakura said. "But yes, we are most definitely going with you."

"No," Kakashi stopped them immediately. "It's too dangerous, and from what you told me, Sakura, he's a volatile character at this point. I will go alone."

"Fuck you, Bakashi," Sakura replied evenly. From behind her she could see one of the shinobi clap a hand over his face, struggling not to burst out in laughter. Kakashi merely sighed and turned towards Sarutobi, who looked halfway between like he wanted to kick them all out and try not to look amused at the same time.

"I apologize for the inconvenience that this grievance has caused, dear Sasuke," the Hokage spoke, addressing the last Uchiha in the room. "I knew of Danzo's previous actions and had ordered him to cease immediately, but I never would've thought..."

Sasuke now seemed like he was too small for this room. He hunched over a bit, shadowing his eyes. "Yes, sir."

"I will now address the mission to retrieve Obito Uchiha," he continued, "and all four of you may stay."

Kakashi did not make a word of complaint, to their collective relief. The room cleared once the shinobi realized that this was not a time for protocol, and the walls were set up quickly. "Now, Sakura, now that your words have been proven to be a veritable source, please explain what you know of the situation."

"Uhhh," she responded.

She could practically envision the smack she heard as Naruto pressed his hand to his face. She flailed to justify herself, waving her arms dramatically. "Look, I came underprepared, the plot was very complicated, I only knew the very important stuff. I don't remember much of this world off the top of my head."

"Start with what you know, then."

"Well," she started, "Sasuke was going to betray the village because Orochimaru promised him power with his freaky voodoo curse lovebite." Sasuke already looked horrified at her words, while Naruto practically shrieked while laughing as he rolled on the floor. "There's a whole lot of bullshit about why he's still alive and how he infiltrates the village but basically he completed the Living Death Reanimation Jutsu (what sort of name is that, whatever) and teams up with Sunagakure to try and invade Konoha during the Chunin exams. Sarutobi, you would've died there fighting Orochimaru."

"Suffixes, Sakura," Kakashi reminded her, but Sarutobi simply grew still.

"A lot of shit I'm gonna skip, Tsunade comes back, Naruto learns the Rasengan, Sasuke your-"

"I learn what?" Naruto is bouncing eagerly again on the balls of his feet, but Sakura continues anyway.

"-brother has an unknown illness that will kill him if he doesn't get treatment soon, we're probably gonna have to search for him too-"

Sasuke seemed conflicted on that, based on what he'd thought about his brother for a large part of his life he should hate his brother, but since it was ordered upon Itachi by the elders he seemed like he wished to go searching as well. Sarutobi gave a grim nod.

"-Oh yeah, and actually that team Akatsuki is led by Madara Uchiha which was actually Tobi which was actually Obito which is why we have to go looking for him now because if everything works out for them we're all gonna fall under an Eternal Mangekyo with the Ten-Tailed Beast and the actual Madara's gonna get reanimated along with the First through the Fourth Hokage - including you, sir, since you're dead - so if we knock some goddamn sense into Obito using Kakashi and the power of friendship everything's gonna work out great." She smiled as if that would convince them enough.

Four blank stares met hers.

"I," Sarutobi said, "have no words."

"I thought she was joking the first time she told us this spiel, but hearing it in more detail it just sounds even stranger," Kakashi deadpanned, wiping his face with the palms of his hands.

"Okay, first step is..." Sakura paused. "Actually if we just go for all of Akatsuki then we'll be able to solve everything. Wow, all our problems are congregated in one place, what a coincidence and definitely not something that was scripted by the gods to show their utter lack of understanding in plot."

"I," Kakashi said.

"Alright here's the plan!" She cheered, standing taller as if that would make up for her lacking height compared to most of the people in the room. "I rush in, I stomp everybody to pieces, then you guys clean up the wreckage. Sound cool? Sounds cool."

Sasuke snorted. "You're weaker than all of us here, Sakura."

Sakura stopped at that. "I am Haruno Sakura," she said, strangely calm, "but I am also far beyond you, beings wrapped in mortal flesh. For it is not humanity that stretches across space in an endless span stopped by its own containment, but time. I am the creator of worlds, the beginning of universes, and also the ending of everything. The sand in the hourglass stops for nobody, not even itself."

And then she grinned. "So, I call team leader up in this joint."

Naruto edged backwards.

Sarutobi held up a hand, a half-smile forming on his face. "I'm sorry, Sakura. You can be the team leader in both spirit and sportsmanship, but on paper I shall write down Kakashi as the squad leader."

Sakura squared her shoulders and puffed herself up proudly. "Yeah, that's fair."

Sasuke still looked unnerved as she passed by him to draw out the exact locations of Akatsuki's base on the map, but he remained silent as she obliviously showed them all exactly how powerful she could be, just by a few simple words. He found that he didn't want to know.

The Akatsuki held various bases, each strategically well placed due to their almost-completely inaccessible grounds protected by barrier ninjutsu and their surroundings. There was an old underground tunnel network of caves that they'd used as their main base, before it was bombed, and then several ones before that closer to Rain, and then a scattering of bases around many different parts of the countries. Sakura pointed down at each one, a dot placed on every base before circling the current one. "I think its uh...this one. At this point in time. Maybe."

Kakashi groaned at the ceiling while Sasuke massaged his temples with the quiet, simmering rage he had when he was trying not to strangle someone. Sakura pretended not to notice.

"It's...much closer than I anticipated," Sarutobi mused, peering at Amegakure's location.

"Madara's hideout was here," she said, pointing further north from the Hidden Rain Village, "when he was in hiding, you'll probably find his old man corpse in there unless Orochimaru stole it, which is not yet. Nagato, or Pain, is the village head, which means that they're either up in the village still or in the cave network. I think they're in the caves right now, so south."

"Alright," Kakashi said, and stood up in a quite relaxed manner, cracking a few joints in the meantime. "We'll head out in the morning, then."

Sakura observed him for a while. After a long moment of scrutinizing, she said, "you don't believe me."

"Huh?"

"Kakashi, that was the most obvious hinting of 'I'm gonna leave without you guys haha see you tomorrow not' I've ever seen in my life." Sakura cracked her neck. "Alright, then, here."

She absently outstretched one hand toward the direction of the window, and in the direct vision of all of them twenty different Zetsu heads were ripped unceremoniously out of the ground, hovered in front of the pane, and simultaneously crushed to plant pulp and smeared on the glass.

They stared at her hand.

She flicked her fingers and the mess was gone. "What?" She said, unconcerned. "They were creeping me out."

Twenty minutes later, she was still trying to explain while an emotionally-exhausted Kakashi was keeled over next to the door, Naruto was banging his head slowly against the wall, and Sasuke was half a centimeter away from grabbing hold of her neck and acting on his murderous intent.

"-Listen, think of it as a hypothetical chance," she said, motioning outside to the horror show of plant bodies being dug out as they were all promptly set on fire without her even looking. "You don't see it, it's the uncertainty principle, there is a fuzziness to how particles behave and it is impossible to pinpoint the exact probability of where something will be at all times. Point A does not immediately go to Point B, there will always be a third factor and quantum theory is not exact every single time you begin measuring it."

"How the heck does this apply to-"

"-The uncertainty principle says that we cannot measure position and momentum of a particle with one hundred percent precision. If we know one accurately, then the other will be less accurate. Your observation of either position or momentum will be inaccurate especially because you cannot see at such an infinitesimal scale. You cannot observe the electron rotating around the nucleus because it is not observable with the human eye, which means that the theory of relativity promises distortions of space-time and that we will always be able to guess, but never know succinctly."

"Sakura," Kakashi sighed, "the theoretical chance of you specifically guessing where each of Zetsu's clones were is rather strange to know, and honestly the floating thing was a bit over the top, but I believe you."

"I have no idea what she's talking about," they could hear Naruto speaking dreamily to the potted plant next to the desk Sarutobi had fallen comatose over. It seemed her speeches could even topple mountains.

"...Quantum theory?" Sasuke appeared a bit unsure. Sakura blinked.

"Did we not learn this in genin classes?" She asked Kakashi, who appeared to just now remember that it was fake Sakura who had attended those classes, not her.

"I can promise you that we have never heard of half the things you've been saying this entire time," he replied, to her horror.

"...Well, anyway," she said, waving the subject aside entirely, "just know that basically knowing the location is easy, it was the time that I had to pinpoint, and time will never be a problem as long as I'm around living in it."

"Because you're a god?" Sasuke monotoned, a bit sardonic in tone.

"No, I am but a concept," she replied. "Alright, here we go, Kakashi let's get this over with I have had way too long of a day and I'm about to follow Grandpa's footsteps over there." The old man was snoring, to Naruto's enjoyment. She promptly watched them, shrugged, and knocked herself out by collapsing on the floor and refusing to get up.

Sasuke and Kakashi stared down at the dead-looking body.

"Two thousand yen if you bring her back to her apartment," Kakashi told the only sane student he had left.

_In her dreams the universe flows backward, planets shrinking, asteroids and smaller bodies of hot magma imploding into dust particles, extinguished by stars burning too hot to sustain themselves, until it collected into a single point that called itself the beginning. And in that life started a river, made by her hands and collecting into something new once again. Because the old one had fallen through her fingertips._

_The river runs._

_Not literally, of course: the river does not pick itself up, every pebble trembling as it climbs up against hard rock and moss growing on the underside of driftwood, fish falling from the water like multicolored pieces of glass transparent underneath sunlight. However, it shifts, changes course, and suddenly the current moves in a different_ direction, _veers off_ path _and above and beyond_ its small _crevice it had resided in. Sakura remembers the Ygdrassil tree, the lifeblood that flowed from it, the goddess that ate its fruit and created this world and stared into her with three spinning eyes-_

 _-and the moon churned blood-red, darkening like the Sharingan, revealing who they had taken their_ kekkei genkai _from and stealing her breath at the same time-_

_Kaguya screamed._

"-Fuck!"

She jolted awake, startling herself with her panic-induced state. "Ah," she said, remembering, falling back from her paranoia. "I was born there."

"Hrghhh it's too early in the morning for this..." The voice next to her moaned, and her head turned to see Naruto collapsed over a struggling Sasuke attempting to pry the other boy off. She dragged Naruto off of him before glancing around the room, realizing that she'd fallen asleep in a place that was definitely not her house.

"Where?" It was a one-word question. Sasuke glared weakly at her.

"Naruto wouldn't stop complaining about me having to carry you back, and then he decided that he'd have to keep watch over you the entire night so you didn't get possessed by an evil demon again, then we all came to my house." Sasuke fell back onto the bed, losing all the fight that was left in him. Sakura shrugged, hair a tangled mess and refusing to fix it.

Naruto was still grumbling, brushing her hand aside when she poked him repeatedly in the cheek in order to get him awake. "Mission's in an hour," she called carefully, watching for any sign of response.

"...Who are you, really?"

"Hm?" She looked over at him. Sasuke was studying her now, closer this time, head supported by one hand, and his brow was furrowed in a way that would've been cute if not for how tired he seemed as well, not only from how early it was in the morning but something else. Weary. He'd dealt with a lot yesterday.

"Why are you so... what are..." He put a hand to his head, closing his eyes and pausing to collect his thoughts. "Why?"

He may have been asking about the three of them, why she had stayed when she had all the reason not to, why she had decided to help them with their individual issues, why she had all the answers without really interfering, but she didn't really have an answer to any of them. So she told the truth.

"I am the blood of the universe," she said once again, but this time she sounded far more serious, far less joking. "I cause the course of events, I am its horizon, simply by existing. I don't know if you're very good at riddles, Sasuke, but I've answered this one already, but I am not making riddles right now and I have never been good at being an actor. I am Time, both the concept and the reality. Wither before me and you shall know my wrath."

"I feel discomfort around you," Sasuke said, "but at the same time I feel a sharp sense of relief. I still don't understand."

"'Time heals all wounds,"' Sakura told him, "and yet I do not agree. The wounds remain. They always do. The pain lessens because you make it so, numbing yourself until you wish to feel nothing. However, the remainder of what had been will always be there. That is fact."

He stared at her now, still not fully understanding but a step closer to what she was. The sheets rustled, and Naruto jolted upwards and flipped himself off the bed with a scream before smacking face first onto the floor. Both Sakura and Sasuke peered down at him.

"Okay," Sasuke droned, throwing her off the bed along with the blankets, "it's your turn to take care of the baby."

"...Naruto's our baby?"

"Get out."

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is a weird ass rendition of a character of mine placed in sakura's body but i'll leave it to you to read the other stories that go along with it  
> there aren;t a lot of them yet to be honest
> 
> go nuts

**Author's Note:**

> This is real meta kids time to go to sleep and forget all of this even happened


End file.
